


A Turn of Phrase

by Star_Going_Supernova



Series: Inky Eyes, Golden Heart [10]
Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: (hopefully), 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe, Fluff, Gen, Humor, No Plot/Plotless, Teenage Henry and Joey, brief mentions of underage drinking, demon!Henry, he doesn't do it on purpose though, this is really just a silly story for fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 01:57:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16296092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_Going_Supernova/pseuds/Star_Going_Supernova
Summary: Five times Henry said something human-weird, and one time he said something demon-weird.





	A Turn of Phrase

**Author's Note:**

> Trying to get out of my slump. This was a lot of fun, and entirely inspired by a huge lists of quotes that I save. Hope you guys enjoy!

• •  **1** • •

To be fair, class that day had actually been stranger than normal. With a substitute teacher for their morning lessons, everything felt _off_ even once their actual teacher showed up after lunch.

Time had lost all meaning, two students had vanished during math, and someone in the room was eating something with a pungent yet unidentifiable smell. Even Joey, seated at the desk in front of Henry, was fidgeting uncomfortably.

They were supposed to be reviewing various concepts for an upcoming English test, but instead of talking about similes and metaphors like they were meant to be doing, one of the girls had asked a question—Henry couldn’t even remember what it was—and now everyone was speaking at once.

Even their teacher was engaging in the madness. Henry remained silent, doodling demonic runes across his notes. He might be in middle school on earth, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep up with his native language.

Joey sighed, slumping down far enough in his chair to tilt his head back and frown upside-down at Henry. “This sucks,” he said.

Henry carefully scribbled the demonic symbol for torture in his notebook. It was a very pretty rune. “I thought you liked when we got off track,” he said, glancing up briefly. He should figure out the translation for Joey’s name.

“Usually I would,” Joey told him, sighing dramatically. “But I actually need the review for this stuff, and I’d rather do it here than at home.”

That made sense. Joey wasn’t lazy enough to skip homework and studying entirely, but he’d welcome any chance to get it done before going home.

Henry was pretty confident in his understanding of the subject, so he’d probably be able to help Joey himself if their teacher wasn’t going to do anything about it. “A simile is when you compare two things using ‘like’ or ‘as.’” He smiled. “For example: this class is as crazy as a circus.”

Joey sat up snorted, spinning in his seat to grin crookedly at Henry. “And a metaphor is the same thing but without ‘like’ or ‘as,’ right? I keep getting those mixed up for some reason.”

“Yep,” Henry said, and right as the room fell into silence, as though everyone was taking a breath all at once before returning to their chatter, he continued with an example. “Metaphorically, this class is a snake coming out of a Cheerios box.”

The air seemed to whoosh out of their classmates, everyone turning to look at him.

“I don’t— _what?_ ” Joey wheezed, asking the question in everyone else’s eyes. “What does that even—”

“Am I wrong?” Henry asked, looking around at the other kids.

Joey opened his mouth, paused, took a moment to genuine consider the question, and then nodded. “No, you’re not wrong.”

Henry smiled as he finished writing Joey’s name in his own language. It was even prettier than the rune for torture.

• •  **2** • •

It was a beautiful, sunny day out, and instead of enjoying it, Henry’s sophomore class was in the library during what was technically their free hour, listening to a guest lecturer ramble on about… something. Henry had stopped paying attention around the same time that the student next to him fell asleep on the table they were sharing. There was a little line of drool puddling beneath his chin and everything.

Henry glanced up at the lady standing in front of their class. She had a scarf wrapped around her head, light brown hair sticking out from beneath it. Her nose was large, but her fake eyelashes, larger. The set on the left side of her face looked to be coming loose, bouncing with her exaggerated movements. In Henry’s opinion, her eyes were a little too big for her face, bulging out in such a manner that she looked crazy.

At least seven necklaces hung down her front, most with a dull plastic sheen to them. Her fingers might as well have been armored with how many rings covered them. And as far as he could tell, she was rambling about finding one’s passion in life, especially those in the arts.

“Perhaps,” she was just saying, “one of you might like to share with us something that makes your heart sing?”

The fake eyelashes bobbed back and forth as she turned her head from side to side in the silence. No one volunteered.

Henry unfortunately made eye-contact with the crazy lady, and she gestured wildly at him. “And what about you, young dreamer? What is one of your passions?” The clump of fake eyelashes finally lost its battle against gravity and fell off. Someone behind Henry snickered.

Usually, Henry would’ve politely and honestly answered, if only to push the attention off himself. But, well, today had felt so _slow_ , and it didn’t look like anyone else had the energy to do anything about it.

Glancing around at his bored classmates, Henry shot to his feet, slammed his fist down on the table, and loudly declared, “I love talking about bleeding to death!”

The boy sleeping next to him startled so badly, he fell out of his chair. Joey, having been in the midst of taking a sip from his water bottle, did a spit-take onto the neck of the girl in front of him, who shrieked and accidentally punched her friend when she flailed around in disgust.

Off to the side, their teacher—who seemed to have been nodding off himself—jumped into alertness so suddenly, he knocked his coffee cup into his own lap, resulting in a surprisingly high-pitched shriek. At least four students had yelped in surprise at Henry’s outburst, and most of the rest now were laughing helplessly into the crooks of their arms at the chaos spreading throughout the room.

The lady blinked rapidly, looking quite lopsided with the missing fake eyelashes. “And,” she began, slower and more hesitant than she’d been for the past half-hour, “do you… have much personal experience with that?”

It was probably an attempt to get things back under control, but instead, it only set everyone off all over again.

• •  **3** • •

At the end of their last year in high school, everyone got together for a last hurrah at a classmate’s uncle’s barn. With lanterns and a large bonfire providing some excellent mood lighting, a table of snacks available at their leisure, and no homework for anyone to worry over, it was the perfect night.

That is, until the punch was spiked. This in and of itself wouldn’t have been too bad in Joey’s humble opinion, but it became a bit of a problem when he discovered that Henry had consumed several cups without knowing about the secret ingredient.

“The fire’s _so pretty_ , Joey,” he said into Joey’s shoulder. They were sitting on the grass, leaning back against a log with a blanket over their laps. A few of their friends had joined them by the bonfire, equally concerned and amused by Henry’s drunken antics.

“You bet it is,” Joey agreed with him, not bothering to hide his smile.

“Mine’s better, though,” Henry whispered. It was the fourth time they’d had this conversation.

One of their friends shook their head and jabbed a couple marshmallows on their stick. “We should tell horror stories. Or, better yet, real life hauntings.”

“Ghosts aren’t real,” someone else said. Henry, for whatever reason, found this hilarious.

Joey only half-listened as the others started sharing experiences that they’d heard about from a friend of their cousin or an uncle’s girlfriend’s boss. He was too busy trying to keep Henry from falling face-first into the ground.

“They think ghosts aren’t real,” Henry wheezed.

Silently agreeing with their friends, Joey rolled his eyes and tuned back into the scary stories. Across the fire, blocked by the flames, a girl’s voice was just saying, “And even though they could’ve sworn they heard footsteps outside the tent, my brothers decided to go to sleep. Me, I would’ve run screaming outta there or something, but, y’know… _boys_.”

Another girl, to Joey’s left, nodded in agreement. A s’more was offered to him, and Joey gladly accepted, managing to take it without losing his grip on Henry.

“So my oldest brother,” the girl continued, “wakes up a few hours later. It’s pitch black in the tent, and all he hears is breathing.” She paused dramatically. “It took him a couple seconds, but he eventually realized that some of the breathing was coming from _above him_. There was a total stranger in the tent with the two of them, just… leaning over them.”

The group collectively shuddered. Joey tried not to think about what might’ve been outside their tent on the numerous occasions when he and Henry slept outside. He took a huge bite out of his s’more to distract himself.

In the half-silence that followed, with only the crackling fire and the music from in the barn breaking it, Henry blinked slowly and said, “If I ever woke up to someone leaning over me, I’d probably just spontaneously _die_.”

Next to him, Joey inhaled sharply, immediately choking on the s’more he’d been chewing. Everyone else around the bonfire dissolved into laughter.

• •  **4** • •

Henry—sprawled on his back, limbs akimbo—stared up at the stars. They were glowing _so much_ tonight. He giggled to himself.

Fae magick coursed through his blood, leaving his wings fluttering against the ground on either side of him and his pupils large enough to completely engulf his irises.

Some of his other demonic traits randomly came and went—his fangs, his blinding, burning eyes, his horns spiraling through his messy hair—but the foreign spellwork was screwing with his transformation abilities.

It’d been an unfortunate accident, him stumbling upon a fae child who was startled enough by his sudden appearance—or perhaps, his aura—to have released a burst of magick at him in self-defense.

Whatever the enchantment was, it left him feeling a strange combination of high as a kite and sick as a dog.

But that didn’t matter, because everything was glowing and pretty and absolutely nothing was wrong.

Where was he again?

Henry wiggled in place. That didn’t matter either, not when he was setting off little mini fireworks with his fingers.

If he concentrated, Henry was mostly sure he could feel the earth spinning beneath him. What a wonderful sensation, flying through space without having to lift a feather. Even he couldn’t pull off magick like that.

He released a great and mighty sneeze, and a single tree just off to the side abruptly lost every last one of its leaves. _It’s naked now,_ Henry thought to himself, wings twitching with laughter.

Below him, the surface he was laying on slowly blackened from the sheer, inhuman heat his fevered body was radiating. There was a brief moment where Henry wondered to himself what it might feel like to genuinely be on fire—all the better if they were his own shimmery blue flames—before discarding the thought, as he remembered that he actually had caught on fire a few times as a child.

Not as fun as it might sound.

Golly, he wished he had someone to enjoy the night with, one of his friends preferably, like Joey or, or Joey. Yeah, Joey’d probably appreciate how much everything was glowing. They could talk about being on fire, and eldritch beasts, and the trials of being ostracized by every other living creature you ever encountered for the first few years of your life.

At some point, lost in his nonsensical thoughts, Henry must’ve fallen asleep for a few minutes, because when he woke up, he wasn’t alone anymore. Joey—he had just been thinking about Joey!—was leaning over him, eyebrows crinkled together. Luckily, Henry was back in his fully human form.

“Henry,” Joey started, very slowly, “why are you laying on the roof?”

“Is that where I am?”

Joey’s frown deepened. “Are you okay?”

Henry contemplated his answer for a moment. The fae’s magick was definitely starting to wear off, but everything still felt altered. Not able to say that, lest he really make Joey worry, he merely sighed and said, “I feel like I might have reached nirvana, but I could just be having a nervous breakdown.”

What he didn’t mention was how nicely Joey himself was glowing. Henry’d picked such a good human to be friends with, honestly.

• •  **5** • •

Their dorm room was silent, both Henry and Joey studying for an early morning history test the next day. There was a lot of material they had to remember, dates and events and names that were mixed up all too easily.

Every now and then, they’d quiz each other on a few things, only to fall back into their own notes afterwards.

Joey finally released a long sigh and stood, cracking his back as he shuffled away from his desk. “I’m gonna go get some coffee, you want anything?”

“Sugar,” Henry moaned into his history book. There was bright yellow highlighter smeared on his cheek.

Swiping up his wallet, Joey stumbled out of the room. The crisp fresh air outside the building filled his lungs, and he felt more alive than he had all day.

He was gone maybe a little longer than he’d initially intended, but it was hardly his fault that he’d gotten caught up in a conversation with a few of his classmates. Human interaction felt wonderful after being cooped up for so long in his dorm room.

They wished him luck on his studying when he finally started to peel away from their group, armed with his coffee and a chocolate muffin for Henry.

“I shouldn’t leave him alone for long when he gets like this,” Joey said, only half-joking. “A sleep-deprived Henry is… dangerous.” The memory of a shattered mirror, broken desk, and Henry staring down in frustration at a fork impaled in his thigh jolted him into motion.

“Aw, I’m sure he’s fine,” one of them said. “Henry’s always so calm. I bet he’ll be almost done studying when you get back.”

Minutes later, Joey pushed into their room just in time to hear Henry mutter angrily, “I am a college student, I _have_ a memory.” He looked to be only a second or two away from throwing something out the window—his history book, if the expression he was making at it was any indication.

“All right, buddy,” Joey said, not bothering to hide his concern, “I think it’s time you took a break.”

• •  **+1** • •

It took a lot to make Henry lose his patience, but it’d been a long few days, and so he could probably be excused for the slip in his saintly self-restraint.

After weeks of hard work, he’d finally finished his final project for his art class: a sculpture made of different forms of glass, including but not limited to marbles, mirrors, and an intricate twisty tube that he’d “borrowed” from a student down the hall who’d been rude to Joey last month.

While he’d actually really enjoyed the assignment, he’d had a lot of other things to do at the same time, which made it hard to relax and take pleasure in his work.

He’d only managed to get two hours of sleep the night before, and only two and a half the night before that. Combined with a number of missed meals and a necessary lack of answering summonings, Henry was _very_ grumpy.

After returning from a meeting with one of his professors to hand in his final paper and discuss the changes he’d made from the previous draft, all Henry wanted was a nice nap— _not_ to see Joey poking at the easily smudged (and difficult to clean) mirrors of his art project.

“Stop that,” he grumbled, half-heartedly throwing his ID card at his friend.

Joey froze and looked over at Henry, who was kicking off his shoes.

“Joey. Don’t you _dare_ —”

Maintaining eye contact and a mischievous grin, Joey carefully but firmly pressed his whole hand against the mirror.

Flopping onto his bed, Henry quietly snarled, completely serious, “I will take away your reflection, human.”

Other than Joey jerking away with a yelp, Henry didn’t get to see the rest of his friend’s reaction, too busy reintroducing his face to his pillow.

_(Years—and one very important secret—later, Joey would remember the brief interaction and ask, “Wait, were you serious about that?”_

_“If I hadn’t been dead on my feet, I absolutely would’ve stolen your reflection,” Henry would tell him. “And I’d mostly forgotten about it by the time I woke up, so that’s why I didn’t do it later.”_

_Joey, softly and with feeling, swore. Henry just grinned, and his own reflection winked.)_

**Author's Note:**

> All of Henry’s weird phrases were actually spoken out loud and in full seriousness, three from myself, two from my poetry professor, and one from one of the other students in that class who was only two letters away from having the exact same name as me.
> 
> Bonus: If anyone can guess who said what, I’ll write them a fic. :D


End file.
